Category: China

I’ve been part of a few book launches this year. I wrote about some others in this post and this post, but a recent one that I hadn’t mentioned is particularly relevant given the push by the Prime Minister for us to give greater emphasis to history (a notion I strongly agree with in principle)….

After getting back from Canberra last weekend, I went to a dinner to mark the retirement of Tony Kelly, one of my lecturers from when I studied Social Work at the University of Queensland. His focus is community development, which is something I always felt was linked to but separate from most aspects of the…

My previous item expressing concern at some threatening comments about Chen Yonglin on a website run by Chinese students in Australia has led to the site being shut down by the site’s administrator. He explains his action in the comments section of the previous entry. I saw this development whilst checking my site on a…

Chen Yonglin’s request for asylum is an issue which quite understandably has become a cause celebre for many people, and I am wary of his interests being put secondary to the consequential issues people are raising. If the reports of how DIMIA initially handled his claim are even half-true, I don’t blame him at all…

China’s poor record on human rights and the threats to dissidents have been receiving a rare degree of serious attention from the mainstream media following the defection of Chinese Consul official Chen Yonglin. It should be mentioned that there are many other asylum seekers in Australia whose cases aren’t in the public domain (and it…

I read a newspaper column a week or so ago that outlined a few reasons why the Democrats had done badly. The reasons given were pretty facile in my view, but I won’t address them at the moment. The column also said that we’d probably just blame the media and also said that this is…

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Andrew Bartlett has been active in politics for over 25 years, including serving as a Senator for Queenland from 1997-2008. This blog reflects his own views, independent of any political party or organisation. The blog was started in 2004 and many of the links in older posts may no longer be current.

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